In 1983, Mays returned to McKees Rocks after attending, playing football for, and subsequently dropping out of West Virginia University. His father’s hauling business had fizzled as industry regulation pushed independent haulers aside. One day, while Mays was in “a local establishment,” he ran into a high school friend named Mike Jones, who was on his way to Atlantic City to sell products to passersby on the boardwalk. Jones convinced Mays to go with him. But there, for the first and possibly last time, Mays couldn’t sell -- at least not at first.


“I wanted to quit the first day,” Mays says. “I was being laughed at. I was being humiliated by people who were broke and drunk.”

But he didn’t quit, in part because he didn’t want to let Jones down. Jones, who is two years Mays’s senior and had played football with him on the Sto-Rox High School Vikings football team, had been Mays’s idol in school. So Mays stayed on and, in time, learned from the veterans of boardwalk selling, including Jones, how to win over crowds and produce sales by using certain tried-and-true techniques. First, draw a crowd. Then, get them to agree or at least sympathize with you. For the last part, the “chill down,” you close the pitch by making the first sale and lining up other buyers.

That same basic process is what you see in many of Mays’s TV spots and in all similar direct-response ads (the ones that instruct you to call now). And that’s exactly why high-profile advertising agencies don’t much care for Mays’s brand of selling. It’s too direct for their tastes -- too lowbrow. “Madison Avenue guys think that what Billy and I do is cheap advertising,” says Sullivan, who has produced Mays’s biggest commercials, the OxiClean and Orange Glo spots.